Independent blog compiled by students of the doctor-writer’s articles and speeches

Bone-idle Britishers

Why is it, asks Dalrymple, that England has had such high levels of youth unemployment for so many years while simultaneously importing very large numbers of young people from abroad to perform unskilled work? It is, he says,

an awkward question to ask because it can so easily inflame insensate xenophobia, but it is nevertheless an important one that I have never seen asked in the public prints. By not asking it, we avoid the corollary questions of what social and economic policies have led to this anomaly.

These questions

in turn might undermine our confidence in the presumptions of our social and economic policies of the last three-quarters of a century.

Better, then,

not to notice the anomaly, let alone try to think about how it has arisen, and to pretend, rather, that more of the same, perhaps slightly better-refined or targeted (more training for youth workers in Toxteth, for example), will solve our problems.